Front International: Conversation : peterscott.us

From 2018 catalog for Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art

Conversation with- Chris Dorland, Peter Scott, and Philip Vanderhyden

CD: I think one of the overarching themes that connects our work is the idea of finding ways to visualize spectacle in the twenty-first century. Of course, we all have different approaches to that, but would both of you agree?

PV: I do. For me this relationship wasn’t always as obvious or necessary, in terms of how I negotiate a connection with a viewer, as it is now. In the past five or six years, things took a pretty violent turn toward it for me. I’m curious to know how this came to be important for you guys. I’m thinking about this because I’ve known Chris for quite some time. Long enough to remember both of us being part of what now seems like such a different conversation. What changed?

CD: Well, for one thing, I think so many important conversations took place between the two of us around 2009, shortly after the financial crisis. It was such a strange time in New York. We were relatively new friends. You had just relocated from Chicago, and we were living down the street from each other. I think of our conversations, both in and out of the studio, as having been so seminal to my development. Both of us had come of age as artists amid the post-9/11 market boom of the Bush era, and we were witnessing all of that, along with a certain understanding of capitalism as it was coming apart at the seams. It was a really important and generative time creatively. In many ways I think we encouraged one another to really dismantle our painting practices. That’s also around the time that we were both discovering Gretchen Bender’s work and, I think, starting to see the world and our art through the prism of financialization and the totalizing hallucination that is hypercapitalism.

I’m curious, Peter, to hear how, if at all, the financial events of 2008 affected you and your work.

PS: I guess we’ve all got a connection through Gretchen Bender. I included her video piece Selling Cars in Market Forces, one of the first carriage trade projects. The Bender piece was a kind of brutal “mash-up” of the reality show Cops, with clips of suspects leaping over cars as they’re being chased by police interspersed with slick, fast-paced ads for luxury cars. The show (and the gallery’s inauguration) took place in the midst of the 2007–8 financial crisis.

The name carriage trade is an allusion to what I saw as a new Gilded Age, marked by a ballooning income gap coupled with self-assurance at the top that the class war had been fought and won. This faith was briefly shaken by the crisis, which, just as briefly, gave me a sense of optimism that business as usual would be suspended in favor of a reassessment of the “casino economy” that had led to the crash. Because the bailout saved those responsible while the crash’s many victims were thrown under the bus, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to me that the legacy of this period had a significant impact on the last election, with neither party offering relief from an income gap that continues to grow.

This was also the period when I began a photographic series documenting banner ads found on luxury-condo construction sites. At first in Williamsburg, then all around the city, I photographed life-size interiors plastered, Potemkin Village–like, on the developing skeletons of buildings. It was like the shadow world of the promise of luxury living—often interspersed with the mundane realities of sidewalk construction sheds—meant to promote envy of those making the right lifestyle choices. By forefronting the ads’ illusions in the compositions I’m trying to convey my own sense of disorientation as more and more of the city’s historic fabric yields to steel and glass pastiches of modernist high rises, which, in a kind of realization of the ads, function as grandiose display windows for the lifestyle featured within.

PV: I can remember when I first saw your work, Peter. The photographs really appealed to me, especially as I was working out similar concerns (by different means) in my own studio.

What attracts me to market forces is that they are so generalized. You don’t get to choose whether or not you are affected by them or participate in them. And one’s compulsory participation is also (obviously) deeply emotional. I’m not even talking about behavioral economics. I’m talking about the bottom-line sadness that I feel when I’m broke vs. the elation I feel when things go my way.

For example, as I was starting to produce my first CG animations, I funded the equipment through some lucky bets I had made in the stock market. I ended up actually making enough money (through random luck) to fund the first shows I did of that work. That attitude of risk pervaded the videos too. There’s a sick pleasure in them.

CD: I totally agree with Peter about the legacy of the financial crisis affecting the last election. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, both in terms of my work and the world in general. So many values and institutions that once seemed unquestionable now seem quite vulnerable and fragile—like capitalist-style democracy, whose uncontested thirty-year run might actually now be seeming quite finite. There is this very clear arc that starts with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and move through the financial crisis of 2007–8 to Trump’s election in 2018.

Frederic Jameson famously said, “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” I’m not sure that is still the case, and whatever might be on the other side of capitalism is a hell of a lot scarier than the end of the world. Trying to describe and articulate what might exist thereafter is certainly a growing concern of mine.

PV: I remember a couple of years ago when the TV show Silicon Valley had an episode where a range of tech companies were giving product sales pitches. All the different pitches ended with the spokesperson saying “making the world a better place.” We’re certainly in a moment where, to a sizable portion of the population, optimism sounds like someone is trying to sell you something.

PS: Actually, I think that’s more or less what Mark Zuckerberg was saying until he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. His utopian “bringing the world closer together” reflects a kind of neo-fifties optimism that the tech economy thrives on. As we relinquish the idea of privacy to become one with the new utopia, we may have succumbed to a kind of Soylent Green condition. The fuel we consume to bolster our identities has turned out to be our identities themselves.